Overview: Zettelkasten

Yep, a Zettelkasten Overview about... #zettelkasten.

Starting point

Zettelkasten is a highly sophisticated approach to note-taking using index cards, developed in the 16th century but made popular in modern times thanks to the extreme productivity of Niklas Luhmann, a German scholar, and How to take smart notes, a book about his techniques by Sönke Ahrens.

I first came across Zettelkasten in late 2019 as I was building MyHub.ai. It seemed to offer something to my personal productivity processes, so I bought the book and wrote the first of several posts on the subject a few months after launch as I tried to integrate both Zettelkasten and MyHub.ai into my personal content strategy.

It took me more than one attempt before concluding that:

• Zettelkasten, as described by Ahrens and the various bloggers I first discovered, was overcomplicated,
• I could use a simplified version on MyHub.ai, thus integrating my note-taking further into my writing and my public online profile, if I shared all notes publicly (Simplifying Zettelkasten by working out loud).

While I was personally OK with working out loud:

• other potential MyHub.ai users may prefer to keep their notes in the private MyHub.ai space which has long been part of the development programme,
• to pilot Zettelkasten on MyHub.ai I had to use MyHub.ai's 'Service Page' feature (see FAQ) - this needs further development and design to better support Zettelkasten.

This Zettelkasten overview

Before embarking on this development I need to do more research into optimising Zettelkasten for the MyHub.ai environment. As I launch this Overview in mid November 2020 I already know that MyHub.ai needs:

• to present Zettelkasten Overviews separately from Service Pages: Overviews could be highlighted within any search result; and/or take the place of the Categories in the Navigation Phrase (see FAQ)
• to support Zettelkasten Overview pages using more sophisticated search expressions:
  • Service Pages currently present, under the subtitle "Stuff I (Really) Like", all the Highlighted (i.e., "The Best") Resources with any of the tags within the Service Page's tag bundle - i.e., they use the "OR" search operator on their tag bundle
  • Overviews likely need the option of the "AND" search operator - i.e., to present Resources with all of the tags within the Overview's tag bundle, and so focusing on the intersection of two or more tags.
  • Overviews could alternatively present weighted search results - ie, the more tags any given Resource shares with the overview's tag bundle, the higher it appears in the search results.

But I sense there's a lot more to know. Fortunately, there's a lot to read and a community to engage with, so I:

• curated my inboxes and adapted my daily routines to bring me more content on Zettelkasten to read and annotate,
• created this MyHub.ai Service page to serve as a Zettelkasten overview on the topic of Zettelkasten.

It's all very meta.

Current Notes

This is where I'm putting my notes from mid-November onwards.

MyHub.ai as hybrid personal publishing/productivity tool

Most writing on zettelkasten is framed by the productivity paradigm, where one's notes are private: created and managed for an audience of one. That allows for complexity - cf A Tale of Complexity.

MyHub.ai comes to world of note-taking from perspective of integrating content curation (Zettelkasten's bibliographic notes) into the user's public online presence. While MyHub.ai Hosted Items support Zettelkasten's fleeting and permanent notes, the underlying tech doesn't support note-taking features like bi-directional links. Yet. Would these make user's public Hubs too complex? So many links! Difficult to follow someone else's logic.

Have public and private levels for each note? So user's public Hub is above-surface iceberg: easy to navigate, rather pretty to look at. The Editor can access everything: processing public and private content using bi-directional links, NLP-driven visualisations, etc.

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The best resources tagged #zettelkasten follow below: